3 budget-friendly secrets for home improvement

When your home's on the market, you want to sell high, but the features that impress buyers the most can be pricy. People get sticker shock when they're looking at the cost of new countertops and new cabinets, but there are certain tricks you can do to make your money go further. Jimmy Rhoades met up with the star of Discovery's Property Wars, Doug Hopkins, to get three pro secrets to keep costs low.

1. Countertops

Always uses stone counters because buyers eat it up. If you think it's out of reach, there’s a cool secret. Some builders have extra material and will give it to you so they don’t have to deal with disposing of it. Find a large construction site where they're building, say, condos or townhouses, and ask to look in their scrap pile. There's typically 40 to 60 percent waste when fabricating granite!

2. Cabinets

Take advantage of the kit cabinets. They are cabinets that come in an assembly-required kit that you often see at your local home improvement store. The face frames come in a box, and the four sides, they just fold down into a flat box. They're full cabinets, they're good quality and they look great.

3. Flooring

What most people don't know is flooring can be refinished, even tile. A typical steam cleaner that you can rent or professional carpet cleaners can come in and steam clean the tile, and your tile will look brand-new. The catch is that doesn't clean the grout, but there's a fix for grout, too. You can scrape the top layer of grout off and re-grout it. This is very inexpensive.

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